Contemporary New Zealand, the year 1990. The two islands have been linked by a gigantic fortress of steel. The Government in reinforcing its policy on keeping death off the roads has put forward a united effort to bridge the two islands, from the western tip 40 miles south of Wellington, to a small Marlborough Sounds farming village, to try and save the entire country from dying out.

Instead, a national power failure disaster culminating from the alarmingly popular Aluminium resorts in the south of the south, causes almost a mega-death catastrophy as over a thousand people, including the popular young Rhodesian prime minister, fall into the misty murk of Cook Strait, never to live. Almost Reginald Fruste, but not quite.

Bridge Alarm is at once a terrifying and compositely unified novel. It is frightening in that it re-echoes many of today's political uncertainties, and Knight in his free easy going prose makes a natural bid to be popular with the Country Library Service class of patron and the connoisseur of something just a little different.

This is a novel that will be a trend setter for the young New Zealand novelist; a reminder that the younger generation is not afraid to show their feelings towards their country in sometimes acid prose, yet logically in clear thinkingly natural assumptions.

Bridge Alarm by Francis J. Knight, Whitehall and Fadmen, 1968. $3.75. Reviewed by Ainsley Redpath.

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Two of the Few tangible results seen in New Zealand of NZUSA's membership of the ISC are at present on Sale in the Students' Assoeiation office.

The booklets on South Vietnam and Rhodesia are factual and well written. They give much of the essential background information if any attempt at a fair assessment of the arguments in both situations is to be made.

Although one is anti-Smith and the other inclined to be anti-US, both present the facts fairly. The larger, more detailed one on Vietnam is better, but hesitates to openly condemn the US (it was. after all, written at a time when the CIA was financing much of the ISC's activities).

The reader is invited to draw his own conclusions, and is provided with a thorough basis to do this—early history of Vietnam, as a French colony, WW II, the Indo-Chinese war, the Geneva Conference, the northern and southern regimes, terrorism and oppression, military aid, the NLF, northern and American involvement.

It is, I think, one of the most concise and neutral (as far as is possible) summaries of the situation that I have seen.

The Rhodesian booklet is shorter and more readable. It is strongly anti-Smith and anti-UDI, but presents a well documented case for its outlook. Like the other booklet, it examines the education system in some detail. It is also well worth acquiring for very little concise factual material on Rhodesia is available in New Zealand.

Although both are now two years old, they are good value espccially at 25c for both, for anybody who still retains some interest in world affairs.

South Vietnam (15c, 105 pp) and Rhodesia (10c, 42 pp) by the Research and Information Commission of the International Student Conference, Leiden, Holland, 1966. Reviewed by Gerard Guthrie.